Request for a new research lab

[lastpick]

I recently submitted a post in the suggestions forum https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 385#p39385 where I proposed a new way of doing research. My Lua knowledge and skill is fairly low so I'm soliciting help and to gauge interest in creating a mod to modify how research works. I'm thinking it might be possible to do this without needing major modification to the game. The general idea would be that we'd have a new resource called K which stands for knowledge and a new lab to produce it. Every manufacturing item would have a current dynamic K value assigned and additionally we'd have a definition for each item that would list their required K values to be unlocked. So as an example a wood chest might have an initial K value of 20 and have a knowledge recipe of 10 K in wood to unlock it. A research lab would provide a constant flow of K which would be applied to whatever was currently placed in the lab for research. So if I were looking to unlock wood chests I'd just place tree logs in the lab which would apply the K towards wood when 10 K were reached the item would be unlocked. I think this could be done using a script to dynamically adjust the tech tree using a manager script that would keep track of the K values of items and unlock or lock them as needed through standard calls. I went into much greater depth in the earlier post as to why I'm suggesting this alternative approach to research, so if this sounds interesting let me know.